A NASA engineer has achieved yet another milestone in his
quest to advance an emerging super-black nanotechnology that promises to make
spacecraft instruments more sensitive without enlarging their size.
A team led by John Hagopian, an optics engineer at NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has demonstrated that it can
grow a uniform layer of carbon nanotubes through the use of another emerging
technology called atomic layer deposition or ALD. The marriage of the two
technologies now means that NASA can grow nanotubes on three-dimensional
components, such as complex baffles and tubes commonly used in optical
instruments.